


Long Road Home

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post-TWS, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-06-08 22:54:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6878161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Sam have made it to Eurasia, looking for Bucky Barnes. Sometimes, to get what you want, you have to be willing to wait.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Road Home

**Author's Note:**

> Uh, weapons of dead Nazis and Hydra agents kept as trophies. I think that's as Teen rated as it gets.

They were in Batumi, kilometers from the Turkish border and headed for the Caucasus, mountainous terrain deep enough to hide a thousand sins, or a HYDRA facility. Sam was spending the night at the Sheraton: Natasha was in town, and they were taking advantage of large beds and a swimming pool cleaner than the Black Sea.

It was summer, muggy and too hot, unredeemed by modern conveniences like air conditioning. Steve’s mother had taken him to the beach one Sunday, decades past, hoping that the fresh air and the salt water would heal his frailty. He had sat in the sand and burned, shrieking when a dark-haired boy lunged at a toddling girl and landed on him instead. Bucky had knocked the breath from Steve’s lungs at age eight. Had kept doing it for the rest of their lives.

“How did you get them all the way here, from Brooklyn?” Steve had wondered, when they rode the train home together that evening, his new friend carrying one sister and attempting to corral the other two.

“Patience,” Bucky had answered, sounding just like Steve’s Ma when he came home from another fight, and then the boy took off down the length of the car where his littlest sister was trying to escape.

Steve had joined Sam and Nat for a little while, sipping a whiskey at the bar overlooking the remains of a Soviet past, and then excused himself to the fourth-floor rooms they had rented from a friendly woman on the street. He loved his friends – all his friends – and he had learned to allow himself time with his new companions as well as time with the memories he held dear.

He walked under layers of billowing laundry, stacks of color ranging from infants’ stockings to wide, vibrant sheets strung across alleyways. It felt more like home than any place Steve had seen since he’d thawed, children running through the streets and fruit sitting ripe in wooden containers at shop doors.

Maybe, once they’d found Bucky, they could move to Georgia. Nick would love that. Actually, if it meant keeping eyes on the ground in Eurasia, he might buy them a housewarming gift.

Of course, that was if they  _ ever _ found Bucky. Mostly, they seemed to find a lot of bombed-out HYDRA facilities: some of them long abandoned, victims to budget cuts or the Soviet fall. Some of them still smoking, a pile of distinctive weaponry and charred flash drives placed outside their buckled doors.

During the war they had taken … mementos, Steve guessed they would be called. Knives, emblems from the soldiers they’d killed. Signs of respect: a battle well fought. Signs of victory: proof that they were alive to sheath the weapon that would have killed them.

HYDRA scientists didn’t carry knives, but they all carried guns. Steve kept the ones left for them, in what Sam called a gruesome trophy kit.

“He might want them, some day,” Steve argued, unwilling to dispose of anything that could help Bucky heal.

“Fuck, this is the weirdest therapy I know,” Sam replied, with a forgiving shrug. Sam forgave more than any of them deserved.

The knock came at his window, not his door, and the only way to the window was across a clothesline and a rickety sheave.

“Here,” Bucky said, hanging from his metal arm, tossing in a handful of pistols and flash drives before tumbling into Steve’s room.

The blood was obvious even under the poor lighting, soaking through dark kevlar and porcelain skin. Bucky had always tanned in the summer where Steve burned and freckled, long Sundays at Coney Island when neither of them could stand to be indoors. Steve supposed that had changed, after years of winter and decades of cold.

Bucky struggled back to his feet, limped toward the window as though he planned to leave. He was stopped by Steve’s flying tackle, which was less an intervention than the spontaneous conviction that he could not watch Bucky vanish once again.

“Wait!” Which seemed like a redundant thing to say, since Bucky wasn’t doing anything but biting down on a groan when Steve jostled his ribs. “I, uh. I have a first aid kit?”

Traveling with Sam, they had a whole first aid  _ arsenal _ , because “not everyone on this suicide mission is a perfect human specimen. Even if I’m pretty damn close, for a normal guy.”

And Steve moved as quickly as he could, expecting to return to an open window and a few bloodstains on the worn rug, but Bucky was still there when he rushed back into the bedroom. Waiting for him.

Even with long, matted hair and fresh scars, even with Erskine’s serum enhancing Captain America’s veins, Bucky could still take Steve’s breath away.

“It’s never – I’m never going to be him,” Bucky croaked, once Steve had finished splinting his leg and moved on to peeling away his chest armor to reach the gunshot under his ribs.

“Well, no,” Steve agreed, his voice as steady as his hands when he dug the bullet out from Bucky’s skin. “And I’m never going to be little Stevie Rogers, Sarah’s boyo, can’t keep his mouth shut or his asthma under control.” He pressed gauze to the open wound and bound Bucky’s ribs tight, knowing from experience that a good night’s sleep would do more to heal it than anything else. Pressed a distracted kiss to the metal fingers running over his cheek and into the strands of his hair. “But you’ll be you, and I promised to love you ‘til the end of the line.”

He paused from where he was running cotton balls soaked in antiseptic solution over a gash down Bucky’s right arm. Looked into the pale blue eyes that he hadn’t dared to meet earlier, as if Bucky were a feral dog who might be goaded into fight, or flight. “I keep my promises, Buck. It might take some time, but you’ll be who you choose to be, and I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me.”

“How?” Bucky wondered, watching Steve’s hair gleam against the silver of his hand. “How would we ever get there, from here?” Steve smiled, rested his cheek on Bucky’s scraped and swollen knee, arched into the press of fingers against his scalp while flesh and blood fingers traced the curve of his lips.

“Patience,” he promised, and let the feeling of Bucky’s gentle hands take his breath away.


End file.
